Importing Excel data

Importing data from Excel is the easiest way to start with Express. There are plenty of good examples and free data sources on the Web, you can pick your favorite or just upload an Excel file of yours.

Excel files may contain more than one sheet of data, but only one sheet can be imported at a time, and they must comply with a few rules:

• Only one table per worksheet is allowed

• The first worksheet cannot be empty

• Worksheets must contain data in the first 20 rows

I prepared a worksheet for these recipes from the World Bank data; it contains some indicators from years 2000 through 2010 for every country of the world. You can download the data from http://xls.apphb.com/Ch13X1.xlsx to have a look at it before going on.

Getting ready

The Excel file can be on the local computer or stored on the Web and accessible via HTTP, HTTPS, or FTP. Please review this document for guidelines and tips about preparing your own Excel data at http://at5.us/Ch13U4.

How to do it…

We will now import a...